What's These Worlds Coming To?

Description

Our contemporary challenge, according to Jean-Luc Nancy and Aurelien Barrau, is that a new world has stolen up on us. We no longer live in a world, but in worlds. We do not live in a universe anymore, but rather in a multiverse. We no longer create; we appropriate and montage. And we no longer build sovereign, hierarchical political institutions; we form local assemblies and networks of cross-national assemblages and we do this at the same time as we form multinational corporations that no longer pay taxes to the state. In such a time, one of the world's most eminent philosophers and an emerging astrophysicist return to the ancient art of cosmology. Nancy and Barrau's work is a study of life, plural worlds, and what the authors call the struction or rebuilding of
these worlds.

Nancy and Barrau invite us on an uncharted walk into barely known worlds when an everyday French idiom, "What's this world coming to?," is used to question our conventional thinking about the world. We soon find ourselves living among heaps of odd bits and pieces that are amassing without any unifying force or center, living not only in a time of ruin and fragmentation but in one of rebuilding. Astrophysicist Aurelien Barrau articulates a major shift in the paradigm of contemporary physics from a universe to a multiverse. Meanwhile, Jean-Luc Nancy's essay "Of Struction" is a contemporary comment on the project of deconstruction and French poststructuralist thought. Together Barrau and Nancy argue that contemporary thought has shifted from deconstruction to what
they carefully call the struction of dis-order.

What's These Worlds Coming To?

Author Information

Jean-Luc Nancy is Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the Université Marc Bloch, Strasbourg. Among the most recent of his many books to be published in English are Corpus; Dis-Enclosure: The Deconstruction of Christianity; Noli me tangere: On the Raising of the Body; The Truth of Democracy; and Adoration: The Destruction of Christianity II (all Fordham).

Aurélien Barrau works in the CNRS Laboratory for Subatomic Physics and Cosmology and is Professor of Physics at the Joseph Fourier University.

Travis Holloway is a doctoral candidate in philosophy at SUNY-Stony Brook, a fellow in poetry at New York University.

Flor Méchain holds an MA in literary translation from the University of Paris VII and is a translator of English,
Spanish, and French.

David Pettigrew is Professor of Philosophy at Souther Connecticut State University.